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YouTube Loses Major Advertisers Over Offensive Videos (rollingstone.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rolling Stone: Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and other major companies have pulled advertisements from YouTube after learning they were paired with videos promoting extremism, terrorism and other offensive topics, The New York Times reports. Among the other companies involved are pharmaceutical giant GSK, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland and L'Oreal, amounting to a potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Google-owned company. The boycott began last week after a Times of London investigation spurred many major European companies to pull their ads from YouTube. American companies swiftly followed, even after Google promised Tuesday to work harder to block ads on "hateful, offensive and derogatory" videos. Like AT&T, most companies are only pulling their ads from YouTube and will continue to place ads on Google's search platforms, which remain the biggest source of revenue for Google's parent company, Alphabet. Still, the tech giant offered up a slew of promises to assuage marketers and ensure them that they were fixing the problems on YouTube. Due to the massive number of videos on YouTube -- about 400 hours of video is posted each minute -- the site primarily uses an automated system to place ads. While there are some failsafes in place to keep advertisements from appearing alongside offensive content, Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler wrote in a blog post that the company would hire "significant numbers" of employees to review YouTube videos and mark them as inappropriate for ads. He also said Google's latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning will help the company review and flag large swaths of videos.

11 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. It's rock and hard place time for youtube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They can either honor the ethos that brought all the eyes to the videos or they can die slowly trying to suck the cock of Wall Street while losing viewers to other video channels. That whole market forces thing is a bitch.

  2. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I'm so glad Johnson and Johnson is removing any doubt that they could be associated with such extremists! Now we can get back to associating them with knowingly giving woman and babies cancer and not giving two shits about it.

  3. HSBC by intertrode · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow, look at HSBC withe their moral superiority. The same bank that launders money for drug lords and the Russian mafia.

  4. Is this San Francisco "offensive" or the real kind by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because if "offensive" is defined as "anyone who supports Donald Trump or refuses to accept the new SJW definition of 'equality'" then I have a bit of a problem with that.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  5. the Snowflake Jihad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We are under a constant assault by a Snowflake jihad whose understanding of freedom of speech is limited to what they agree with. In America this is probably the darkest time in over 200 years with regards to the Bill of Rights. We are living in an age of the self-righteous perpetually offended punk, a punk without a hint of self-understanding or irony.

    1. Re:the Snowflake Jihad by ogdenk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's funny, the same sort of people who rail against corporations and want free speech curtailed are exactly the same ones who decide they want to replace government tyranny with corporate tyranny when it fits their agenda.

      If a private business has a right to limit offensive speech on a social media platform in the name of moral righteousness, they have just as much right to deny service to people they find objectionable on the same grounds such as homosexuals or muslims. That's not a world I want. Everyone is offended by SOMETHING.

      Would you be OK with ISP's being pressured by moral crusaders to not provide connectivity to people who host "offensive" content because the moral crusaders decide to label everyone they don't agree with "neo-nazis"?

      If certain advertisers don't want their ads showing up on a certain channel's content, whatever, that's fine. But to demonetize a channel's videos entirely because some snowflake finds it offensive, that's bullshit.

  6. chip on your shoulder by DrYak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Given Europe's attitude towards hate speech and how they enforce "right to be forgotten", I'm surprised that they haven't already erected a GFW at this point

    ...said the main living in the glorious country where the simple apparition of a nipple is considered a major mediatic catastrophe, where breast feeding is a public offense, and where anything remotely sexual is sure to traumatise the next few generations of youth. (and where nude bodies are probably terrorism-level material).

    To each country and culture its own taboos.
    For Germany, it might be hate speech, for France it might be "right to be forgotten", and for the USA it's anything which isn't missionary position with the sole purpose to procreate.

    Beware of the nude-nipple-terrorists, America !

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  7. Re:Let me be the first to exclaim... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Ya, well, that's kinda part of it.

    We've got grade school kids spewing white supremacist bullshit in the schoolyard because they hear their seemingly-innocent YouTube role models like JonTron and PewDiePie saying it.

    That sort of new to this era of self-publishing.

  8. Re:Is this San Francisco "offensive" or the real k by elrous0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why are you objecting to ISIS videos in terms of Trump?

    Because the language Google is using sounds like this includes WAY more than just ISIS videos. Words like "derogatory" take on a whole new meaning in Silicon Valley on on college campuses today than they do in red state America. So it's very important to establish EXACTLY whose definitions we're using here and exactly what videos are going to be blacklisted.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  9. No, "offensive" is defined as racism by rsilvergun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Trump (really Bannon, Trump's just the mouth piece) managed to make racism OK again. I'll Let that one sink in...

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  10. Re:Is this San Francisco "offensive" or the real k by Raenex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What is "offensive" is defined by the companies who are paying Google to place their ads.

    It's defined by the "progressives" that whine the loudest when somebody speaks out against one of their pet causes. The social justice warriors of today are the same breed as the religious right from 20-30 years ago. If these companies had any business sense or corporate responsibility, they would just ignore them instead of trying to appease them.